LSXcalade Twin Turbo Engine Setup Details! Why Does it Work So Well? (Tips For Your Own Build)

so today we're going to go through the engine bay on the escalade and i'm going to explain everything about it all the specs on the engine like the manufacturers involved the freaking injectors the headers the intercooler the throttle body the vacuum manifolds the valve covers all that stuff so you can get an idea of what's going on in there because sometimes kind of forget that like most of you are new here and new to me and don't know what's in there the basic rundown is it's a 427 dart block with twin precision 76 75s it's got frankenstein heads frankenstein br3 heads because uh they didn't have the the f series whenever i built this engine i had like specked out and put together in early 2018. it's not like a crate motor from anybody it's like my own kind of concoction and composition executed by people who know more than me that's basically what it was like if i had to sum it up i was basically the general contractor for this engine i didn't build it i didn't make the parts in it like i didn't assemble it but i used my best judgment to assemble the best group of smart people and companies and people at those companies to rely on for the best information to create the best performing combination that i could with what i was doing i gotta say i would not have been able to do any of this if it was not for cp carrillo dart and frankenstein like their involvement with this motor made this motor possible especially cp carrillo because this it's the dart shp pro block and what the shp means is it's got all the factory mounting points for like ac oil pan all that stuff but the pro means that it has the higher nickel content of the standard next block their darts nomenclature is wicked confusing doesn't make any sense dart i love you you're great but you're it doesn't make sense it's confusing frankenstein heads are cnc ported it's about just under 10 to 1 compression i believe with the custom cp pistons and carillo rods they told me those rods and pistons are good for 3000 horsepower so like this the only thing this motor does not have to go to the 3000 horsepower level is like the half inch head studs it's still on standard um standard thickness arp head studs but the the engine was built around the turbos because i knew what turbos i was running well before i ever had the engine built and that's why it works so freaking well because the engine is an air pump an integral part of an air pump are the compressors on the air pump so you build the engine to work with the turbos and pick the turbos according to the amount of power that you want to make you got to be realistic when you're thinking about this stuff like do you want to make 2 000 horsepower okay but are you going to spend most of your time driving around at 1 000 because it's not going to drive the same it's not going to light up like a freaking christmas tree at a thousand horsepower setting just because the compressor map is not where it needs to be to be optimized at that power level a lot of times you can overcome that with the cam specs and the motor and compression ratio all that stuff but there's always going to be a little bit of give and take there you really got gotta think this through and that was was awesome about this specifically for the top end it's got a crawer uh billet shaft rockers on there because this camshaft is like over 700 lift and some ridiculous like 750 or 250 260 duration that's why it freaking screams like a small tire car because it it's a small tire car motor basically like i shifted like eight thousand eighty one hundred frankenstein and steven at cam motion um they work closely together on a lot of stuff so they were actually going back and forth with me as a group to configure this whole cylinder head top end package and like i consulted with both of them for the compression ratio when i was picking the dome depth with carrillo and all that stuff it was all built with the same purpose in mind and a lot of people get off track they just start buying stuff because it's what they get a good deal on and then they're upset whenever their combination doesn't perform like it should because they didn't optimize everything to work with everything else and that's why this combo works so well because i did that like i said in my last video i haven't had this header or that valve cover off in two years it's a stock oil pan stock truck oil pan stock truck accessory brackets stock truck ac i did have to convert it to a drive-by cable throttle body to run with the ms3 but i actually kind of like that because it's more responsive that way like it's a lot you know you have more tactile feedback with your foot with uh this than you do with the uh the drive by wire ones um i made these headers myself this was actually the first thing i ever fabricated at a tube like this piece of tube right here was the first one i ever cut at my shop like i actually learned a lot about header making through uh way back when finnegan started youtube he had the video making headers on his jet boat and i learned all about you know the rock test and all that stuff so i just kind of like started doing it and it came out great i made the whole turbo kit myself all the way from the intercooler which i have another video explaining just the intercooler from uh you know a couple weeks back you should go check that out but it's uh these valve covers are from some they're just like eddie motorsports or something i think and i originally made these headers off of the stock motor with the stock valve covers before i knew that i was gonna need shaft rockers so um that's why when i was consulting with cam motion and frankenstein they're like man you need shaft rockers on this thing because the stock rockers are going to be run under my wall at like 1700 horsepower like it's not a good idea so i'm like well crap all right so i got the shaft rockers but i had to get bigger valve covers to clear the shaft rockers which got in the way of my header so you can see here i had to play with the spacing on the headers one because the motor is not actually in the middle of the engine bay but also because now that valve cover did not fit behind the header so what i did is i back welded the valve cover like i welded the inside of it to build up material and then i shave the outside so it's kind of like radiused around that header excuse the oil mist there but it's it's kind of like it was hard to get those in the same place because the collectors are in the same place relation to the engine bay but the engine is actually skewed over a little bit just from the factory like they're all like that and if you just notice that now it's going to ruin your life because they're not in the middle of the engine bay that's why it's way tighter over there and this primary was a lot tighter a lot squirrelier to get in there than this one was because it didn't have as much room to get to the motor i'm running three and a half inch exhaust it goes stainless for this portion here kind of wraps under and then it transitions to aluminum because it's a lot lighter and when i do full exhaust on this thing um it's going to have like freaking 18 feet of tube all the way to the back and that's a lot of weight if you add that up from stainless to aluminum plus from a fab standpoint i prefer to work with aluminum like i think it's easier that's just some people might disagree maybe i'm weird but i really like working with aluminum i just i think it's fun powermaster 225 alternator i over spin the crap out of these and they blow up sometimes but i know this it's just kind of hard to find a pulley ratio that works with 8 000 rpm and still making enough voltage at idle to charge everything because i have the aeromotive five gallon a minute brushless fuel pump this throttle body is actually just like a g plus from ebay i turned it upside down so like the big bulkhead part is on the bottom and i made this bracket here out of sheet metal for the throttle cable and i had to shave the alternator a bit so it wouldn't it wouldn't hit there which i need to you know it's dang close and it looks like i need to shave this a little bit more because it may have shifted but i keep an eye on that for that reason throttle body has a v-band flange welded to it what i did was i welded it on there and called up jeff let's junior he's a good friend of mine and really like he got me into all this fab stuff so like i'm eternally grateful for everything he taught me and he really guided me through this whole process like of building it he didn't do any of the fab work on it but if i got stuck somewhere or i needed like you know like what kind of what thickest material should i use for my fuel cell brackets or where should i route this or if i put this here is it going to melt that like that kind of stuff i was able to ask him and he would stop by my shop like on his way back from work and be like oh yeah put this here don't put that there if you put this here it's going to get screwed up if you use this thickness for this bracket it's going to bend use this stuff like so i did everything he told me to do and it works and coincidentally enough the only thing he said he said that's not gonna work he picked up my downpipe and he said this aluminum is too thin you're gonna blow that out and i was like okay well i'll redo it later but this is what i have right now and lo and behold it took two years but those downpipes blew out so jeff you were right and that's why it's really important to find people that have done what you want to do and trust them when they give you advice like don't be in one of like a an don't be that guy that asks people something and then does something else like trust people that like pick a select few people that you know have done what you already want to do and listen to them they know how to do it i did and it works um you know stock truck water pump it's got a melling oil pump it's got fid 2000 injectors air motive regulator aeromotive pump filter all that stuff all red horse performance and lines and fittings they're another um big help of my program is red horse is awesome like their stuff is awesome the people are awesome if you need and fittings hit up red horse because they're where it's at um i ran everything under the intake so you can't see it like all the wiring harness and everything's under there uh a regulator is mounted here and it's all hard to get to whenever you need to like take it off and on but i've only done it one time like i put the motor in and the pickup ended up being too close to the pan so i had to pull it out and put it all back together and for the most part most of this has not been touched since then that's a k-tec belt tensioner and pro tip for k-tec don't freaking engrave your name on the side that you can't see i don't know why they did that the dudes at ktek are pretty cool and they actually engraved my logo on there too but when you put it on a truck water pump it's on the bottom you can't see it like you got all this room up here where you could say like you have like kate like ktek and then put my logo or like freaking suck it or whatever you want on there and it's not you know whatever ati balancer whatever it's stock holley fuel rails it's all ls3 configuration stuff if you haven't picked up on that already and these turbos if you haven't picked up on that already are the gen 2 ball bearing stainless turbine housing v-band inlet units and they've been great um but on future builds i'm going to be using stuff from force performance and zona rotor i was actually going to put zona rotors on here and then you know winter happened and time caught up to me and i didn't have time to change everything so i will use those zona rotors on a different build in the future it's got the factory power steering pump um i actually never even drained the pump to do any of this i just kind of flopped it over the frame rail and i never drained the ac compressor system either to do any of this it just kind of stood there too so all the ac lines are factory originals and i used this little vacuum distribution block over there i kind of hit it right on here so this has a main reference line that runs through the manifold and then i can t everything off on here so i need to add stuff that uses manifold reference i come over here instead of having to put a bunch of bungs in the intake and have it be a big mess um yeah the heater core line is looped i have a uh an expansion tank i made for it before drag week 2018 but push came to shove i ran out of time didn't put it in it's actually sitting over there in a box and um we're gonna go over there and tell you about that kind of stuff too but i guess to wrap it up for the motor um i don't think i've explained the lifters to the valve springs yet it's got uh johnson limited travel lifters so they are hydraulic still but they are very very stiff and do not have much movement so it's like a it's almost like a solid lifter but it's not but that's that's kind of the reason why i haven't had to touch the rockers at all and it's got pack valve springs it was put together by a guy named mark vinson back in pennsylvania and he is actually the guy who builds lutz's motors that's how i got with him dudes like it's one of those cases where you would not expect this guy to be as freaking baller at this stuff as what he is like he's a former burger king franchisee and he built he builds motors in his garage of like his nice house next to his like jaguar and daley drives like an old gmc truck like mine like it's it's the strangest thing like this guy does not have to to fiddle around with motors but he's in there doing some freaking awesome stuff like he did all the machine work on this he assembled it the dude's been building he had a seven second turbo fox body running like 200 miles an hour i think back in like 2000 like before turbos were even widely accepted as a viable power adder like he was out there kicking it before jeff lutz was with turbos it's he's i really gotta give props to him for putting this thing together the way that he did it's been just a freaking stallion for everything i've put at it so to summarize mark vincent built the motor vincent racing engines it's got cp carillo rods and pistons frankenstein heads cam motion cam shaft crawler shaft rockers melling oil pump um custom turbo kit built by me with wolf aircraft tube that's a big one wolf aircraft is where i get all of my tubing from it's american-made american source they're in detroit awesome people and really the guys over there were literally the first company to believe in me when i set out to do this and i owe them the world because if it wasn't for them to to believe that that really gave me the confidence to go all in on it and right after them came joe rivera at pro torque and after that i was just i felt like i could do anything because like pro torque is a big deal i'm like joe believes me this is awesome because at the time i had all kinds of people that at the time i respected telling me i was dumb but here joe rivera pro tour was like dude that's great i'm all about it like let's do something and you know sometimes that's all you need so those guys you know i owe them the world it's been a freaking one heck of a ride i feel like we're just getting started now for the actual shop that i'm standing in uh this is not my shop it's called triple seven performance in arlington texas and it's owned by a friend of mine named john lawson who i met through streetcar takeover last year he kind of came to all the events and i was there too because i was an intern and he just kind of like became one of the guys he moved here from midland texas to start this shot because he's you know his main career is like oil and gas stuff but he's a just one of the most dedicated people that i know who will just start just dig in and do stuff even if you know people tell him he's dumb and whatever he's maybe even a little bit more crazy than i am and that's why i'm here because i want to be around people who push me and john's one of those guys like for example this is his personal truck and his mustang that he had last year which is now has like a billet block coyote ridiculous irs car going for like sixes it's at the chassis shop now this is his old motor it's a sleeved coyote 2 000 horsepower setup and it's got a turbo 400 and a transfer case if you haven't figured out what's going on right here it's going to be a 2000 horsepower ford version of what the escalade is essentially except without the overdrive because uh i tried to get him to use a 4l80 and he's like no i'm just going to put a 400 and it will all right but either way it's gonna be twin turbo freaking nasty nasty thing and he's gonna push this way harder than i ever pushed the escalade just because john's a wild mofo like that he wants this truck to freaking go bottom mates and he even said sevens and i think that's a little bit crazy but at the same time that i think it's crazy i think it's freaking awesome that he's going for it because you know what they say you shoot for the moon you land among the stars the ctsv here is a shop car it's getting like a 434 lsx twin turbos all that kind of stuff too you know some more customer cars here that's some kind of 2000 horsepower gt350 and you know there's a mustang with a blower on it and a charger rt it's got like a cam and nitrous and stuff this is a relatively new shot but it hasn't even been here for a year and the first time i came here there really wasn't all that much going on because john was new everybody was new like none of us have a pre-established network in dallas so it was kind of hard to get some traction but i've been here full-time since june and just from when i got here to now my god this place is just straight up and it's super awesome to see because like it's a great group of dudes here you see him in some of my other videos um john littlejohn uh he's the ducey stuff guy he works here he's super awesome dude and then logan's another tech here he's a super awesome dude and logan actually made a rescue call to this guy with the charger like last friday at one in the morning because he had some kind of problem logan got up went rescued him got his car towed back here and then drove the guy to work what shop does that and it wasn't even anything he did that was his fault that was just him being a solid guy so if you're in the dfw texas anywhere like triple seven performance that's where i'm at that's where you need to be i guess i don't technically like work here like i don't have an active involvement in everything that's going on with these cars unless like something needs to be welded then i do it i guess the best way to put it on like a much smaller scale is i'm like the cleatest to their jeremy i guess i'm kind of doing my stuff in here i help when i can when they need me to if someone came in here like yeah i want a custom turbo kit then i would put my work hat on and i would do stuff but you know i'm pretty much just doing my own thing we're all on the same team and it's really awesome like i love being here and they actually make like bakery equipment on the other side of the building so like this whole building is not our building they have like a lathe and a mill and stuff over there and they've helped me like cut some cut some things and machine some stuff down before just because like they're pretty awesome dudes too and you know it's just it's a great atmosphere like i love being here i never really thought i'd end up in dallas but heck stranger things have happened i drive an escalade that i say i'm going for eights like what kind of world was that that was the freaking whole big long rambletron my mouth is dry i need to drink some water uh i'm sure i glossed over some things on there if you have any more questions drop a comment i will 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